Researchers simulate an entire fly brain on a laptop. Is a human brain next? [Video]

As a large team of scientists recently completed the assembly of a complete wiring diagram of the adult fruit fly brain, Phil Shiu decided to simulate that massive circuit — 139,255 neurons and 50 million connections — in a computer.

That simulation, which can run on a laptop, proved amazingly good at predicting how the real fly brain responds to stimuli. In a paper published today (Wednesday, Oct. 2) in the journal Nature —  the same issue in which the fly brain’s wiring diagram, or connectome, is announced — Shiu, a former postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues report that the computer model accurately predicts the neurons that will be activated in a fly’s brain when taste and touch sensors are stimulated.

“It’s been unclear how much the connectome would actually allow us to predict neural activity,” said Shiu, who now works at a startup, Eon, that works on artificial intelligence approaches to …